Sunday, August 20, 2006

Farewell, Sweet Summer Vacation

Okay, I didn't actually spend my summer here. I spent it at home, for the most part, hiding from the heat in my air conditioned house and worrying about global warming when I wasn't feeding the children or playing on the computer.

But this picture is how summer FEELS--more leisurely, more warm and languid, more slow-moving. Summer is the chance to re-group, to avoid the constant hassle of scheduling one's life into the tiny little boxes that mean endless meetings, classes, obligations of the school year.

Tomorrow I return to that school year. Back to teaching, back to preparation, back to the occasional stress headache. It's fun, it's rewarding, but it's hard work. (See my previous blog about the life of an English teacher). On Wednesday evenings it's back to grad school and the reading with which I can barely keep up (not to mention keeping up with the tuition!).

So going back is necessary, but it's frightening. And those palm trees look farther away every time I look at them.

Book One in the Undercover Dish series

Tributes to Great Writers

International Author Interviews

Mark Twain on Writing

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."